Response to a face book post

This is a response to a face book post by a friend. I started answering it and as you can see I went off for a while. Its about education but I think you can get that.

Tonia you're living in a fantasy world. People who work hard don't always get ahead. How would you know who is a good teacher and who is a bad one? Test scores? Teachers will teach to the test. Graduation/pass rates? They will lower the expectations or just pass kids through. Teaching, to a certain extent, is a subjective field. A good teacher might not actually 'teach' you anything. There are so many different levels of teaching. My favorite teacher actually taught me nothing but how to be a better person (which I failed at but that is my fault not Mr. Hylen's). A teacher can teach you something but they can't make you learn it and that is the difference. Education shouldn't be about memorization anymore. There is a saying in the military, and I am butchering it, but its something to the extent that we are always ready to fight the last war during the current one. We are finally ready to teach my parents generation now that we are on to their grand kids. We are still “teaching” memorization of facts instead of application of those facts. When I was teaching (and I did raise test scores 25% in the four months I was there so I guess I was a “good” teacher) I didn’t care if they couldn’t remember the Pythagoras' Theorem but that they knew HOW to apply it.
Raising taxes aren't a good answer either. In the current political climate that won't work. People don't want to see higher taxes. If Michigan raises the taxes on say...um...I can't think of a local business based in Michigan but lets say Meijer's. They will pack up and go to a state that DOESN'T "over" tax them. While we see them as unnecessary tax cuts just think what would happen if they didn't have those breaks and left all together. Especially in a state like Michigan where you Detroit losing (at one point atleast) 10% of its population every year and you had GM just decimate the economy the state can’t afford to risk losing any major employers. That is why you see cities like Ann Arbor, or maybe it was even the state I can’t remember now, giving Google that huge tax break to build in Ann Arbor. That is why companies GM and Ford get them.
There is no good answer. In my opinion, and trust me it PAINS me to say this, but I agree with Tonia. Much like GM the unions have hurt themselves with outrageous requests and while they flourished (to a certain extent) they have painted themselves into a corner. They have hurt themselves in the long run and really hurt what should have been their main focus, the students.
As I implied earlier in my opinion what we need to do is stop looking at education as a whole like it is still the 20th century. Smaller class size doesn't mean anything if we aren't giving the kids what they need NOW not twenty years ago.
However often it isn’t the teachers or the schools fault. What this country needs to do is take a long look in the mirror and realize that WE have put us in this position. Because I like to use wrestling and TV as examples take a look at the line below from when Good Ol’ JR interviewed Mick “Mankind” Foley:
Jim Ross: Don't you think, that it's about time in your life, where you look squarely in the mirror, and accepted the personal responsibility for who you are? Don't you believe that you, yourself, have caused and brought on all these problems?
That is what WE as a whole need to do. The problems in this country are OUR fault.
Now I don't have the answer. If I didn't i would have been a cafe manager or working at an IT Desk right now. I have been on the front lines of education for short period of times. I have had to reach TEACH 18 years old how to read and do basic math. I can tell you what isn’t working but that is only part of the equation. That is like having 2x+3 but not knowing what it equals to solve it. I don’t have the answer but I can tell you what won’t fix it. All this fighting that this country has been doing since 2000. This is a problem that will, hopefully, be solved, and by better and smarter men than I. I am just a guy who has to walk students through a very easy user ID claim process on a daily basis.